


Ice Is Thicker Than Blood

by Siguna



Series: A Memory of Light [3]
Category: Hellboy (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Balor's A+ Parenting, Crossover, Jötunn Loki, Loki Silvertongue, M/M, Norse/Celtic myth mash-up, Nuada Silverlance, Silver Princes, Svartálfaheimr | Svartalfheim, Álfheimr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-22
Updated: 2013-10-22
Packaged: 2017-12-30 03:44:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1013681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siguna/pseuds/Siguna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Nuada's mother's name comes from the actual name of Balor's wife in Celtic mythology. Her story, of being the Svartalfr Princess, marrying Balor to unite the Elven realms and Malekith being her rebellious younger brother, was all thought up in conjunction with <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/dfotw/pseuds/dfotw">dfotw</a>, who then wrote it all up in fairytale format and I kept referring back to that in writing this, and couldn't have done it without her. </p><p>This series is firmly ignoring whatever contradictory canon will be introduced in Thor 2, in regards to Malekith or anything else. The crossoververse is a much better place for Loki to exist anyway.</p><p>The part about the bifrost destruction disrupting the balance of power and instigating chaos across the realms comes from the Thor 2 prelude comic.</p><p>Thank you so much for reading and giving my little series a shot. I so hope you're enjoying it and feedback is always welcome :)</p></blockquote>





	Ice Is Thicker Than Blood

The palace Vídbláinn is hung in an eerie quiet, one not of calm but of bleakness, the light and life seeped from it as from a corpse. It is hardly the palace, nor the Alfheimr Nuada knows.

Loki has thrown open the windows in Nuada’s bedchamber to the night breeze and even that feels colder than usual. Nuada doesn’t mind the temperature, is glad for it for Loki’s sake, but the baleful whip and whine of it falls hard on his skin and ears. He hooks an arm experimentally into the curve of Loki’s horns and lets his sleepless eyes wander the slumbering form sprawled at his side, and Loki sleeps unusually loose and untensed, breathing easy, though his brow is curled into its wonted scowl. Nuada strokes dark hair with slow drifting fingers and shifts his gaze to the carven wall panels that face the bed, the elaborately twining lines as familiar to him as the stories they hold.

He searches for one face among the carven many, one that comes up again and again across the narrative and it is as he remembers; smooth and gently smiling. He wonders, as he has often, if she was truly so perpetually contented as the legends make her out to be.      

When Nuada thinks of his mother the image he has is of that peaceful portrait face. He does not remember her. What he knows are the stories, legends of their realm and of the neighboring Svartalfheimr, home of the Dark Elves, of which his mother was Princess before she journeyed to Aflheimr to marry the Light Elf King. Legends among those that over thousands of years he’s heard repeated at feasts and sung by minstrels and read to children from books; legends whose scenes are made into paintings and woven into tapestries and stitched onto clothing and engraved into weapon hilts; and, most famously, made into _mak_ _áhangrr_ , pictures elaborately carved into wooden blocks then covered in ink to print the rolling murals and smaller, oft-framed works that Alfheimr is known for.

He stares at the depiction of her engraved into his wall, at the practiced and perfected lines of her face that he’s seen repeated in a thousand places and this is how he knows her, by her likeness, by her epithets. She was Lady Cathleann of the Clan Iváldi, Crown Princess of Svartálfheimr, Jewel of the Dark Elves; she was the Peace Promise of the Elven races; she was Queen of Elves Light and Dark alike and begetter of the first mixed blood Prince and Princess; she was skilled Healer and Sorceress supreme.

Somewhere in all of that, she was also his mother.

Loki flings an arm out to curl at Nuada’s throat, and Nuada nods into the comfort of cool fingers, so bitingly real and dear. The Princess on her Svartálfr ship gazes back at him with wood-cut eyes and sometimes it’s difficult to believe that she ever existed outside of the legends. Difficult to think of her as a being of flesh and blood who walked this realm as Nuada walks it now, who once held him in her arms and maybe sang to him and maybe had dreams for him, and maybe was something more than brave and noble and devoted to Elven unity. It’s difficult to separate her from the idyllic mold in which Alfheimr holds her and shows her and speaks of her, difficult to think what if she wasn’t always so regal and serene? What if she was sometimes uncertain about her heavily politicized marriage? What if she was sometimes afraid, sometimes cried, sometimes stumbled?

Her importance to Elfkind is not lost on him, nor does he doubt that she was so bright and strong and steadfast to have won over Alfheimr so completely, Dark Elf as she was. But Alfheimr reveres her as a symbol more than a person and the version of her that was once Nuada’s mother is alienated from him all the more for it.

He’s seen songboys half his age croon of her beauty and brevity as they tell of the Alfheimr-Svartálfheimr union she did bring about in her marriage to King Balor; he’s seen craftmasters instruct younglings on how best to show her likeness with paint or thread or chisel. This is who she is: heroine Queen of Alfheimr, ingrained in the realm’s tradition, belonging as much to him as to the next Elf.

He slumps flat onto his back and shifts closer to Loki, sighing at the reaches of the mural that extend onto his ceiling. The Light Elves are a craftspeople and such is an important part of their culture, Nuada himself as skilled a craftsman as any, but he finds no joy or inspiration in depicting the same tired, perfect scenes from the legends over and over again. As a boy he would abandon his lessons in frustration, all the more put off if having been prompted to work on a scene involving his mother, and feeling all the more disconnected from her because of it. What he _wanted_ was to capture the beauty and grit and mystery of what he saw and felt and imagined.

His main love is for makáhangrr, while Nuala does favor the loom, though she never shared his frustration. She would often weave likenesses of their mother holding the two of them as babes and he could not understand why, and her tapestries were held in praise while his unusual prints were not. Eventually, reluctantly, he had foregone makáhangrr altogether and escaped to the forges, taken up smithery and loved that also, and become renowned for his work. It was only much later, during his self-imposed exile from Alfheimr, that he did find the peace to take up makáhangrr again.

Those were simpler times, for all he had taken his exile to be a grim thing. The turn of events has bleakened much since then and so have Alfhiemr’s legends. To his disconcertion Nuada features in them more and more; and so does another.  

Long had it been a footnote in Princess Cathleann’s story that she had travelled from Svartálfheimr to Alfheimr accompanied by her younger brother. Young Malekith’s continued dwelling in Vídbláinn with King Balor and the royal twins even after his sister’s death was made little of; and so was he. His native Svartálfheimr was under Balor’s rule and his youngling nephew was heir to both Elven realms. The young Dark Prince had been sent to Alfheimr with his sister in hopes that his growing up in her court would strengthen the bond of Elves Light and Dark, but after Queen Cathleann’s too-soon passing, King Balor had little interest in what became of Malekith and less still in his council. Malekith was the forgotten Prince, neglected and sidestepped; and likewise was the bitter resentment he grew to harbor against Alfheimr and its ruler.

Knowing his father, that Balor should have overlooked Malekith’s quietly fostered treason is of little surprise to Nuada. What grates on his soul even now is that he did not realize it himself; that he had abandoned Alfheimr in the wake of the desolation of its war with Midgard; that his absence and Balor’s weakness and grief over what had happened with the Golden Army had allowed Malekith to finally sieze his opportunity to wreak havoc upon the Elven union, breaking Dark from Light and reclaiming the Svartálfheimr throne as his own, and vowing not to stop there.

Things could not have been made easier for him – Nuada could not have made things easier for him, and then returned from his exile and made an even greater mess of things in his attempts at ending the humans’ usurpation of Elven territory and reclaiming Svartálfheimr to his rule. He had killed his father, strained his relationship with Nuala, lost the creature that was his partner and friend at the hands of the humans, and by their damned hands also lost the Crown that was the key to awakening the Golden Army, his one hope by which to defeat Malekith.

He would not, could not have stopped fighting them for it but for Nuala, who had sided with the humans and seemed as if she might take her own life and so end his to stop him; but in the end had settled for badly injuring herself, and by extension Nuada, to render him incapable of continuing his fight and give the humans the chance to destroy the Golden Crown.

He knows not what she was thinking; has never understood many things about her despite the connection they share. What he knows is that she would not have ended their lives, if only because to lose him would have been to lose Alfheimr’s last protector against Malekith’s reign of terror. And for Alfheimr to fall under Malekith’s rule would set him on the path to move on not only to Midgard, but all the Nine Realms.

But that, all of that had been before Thor destroyed the Bifrost and turned everything on edge. His act has cut off Asgard’s defenses from the other realms, instigated a cosmic shift of power balance across the Yggdrasil and engulfed the worlds in chaos. And the forethreat is Malekith and the dark forces behind him, now stronger than ever and there won’t be any waiting around for him to strike.

This is what weighs Nuada down and keeps him up at night. This is what has had him roaming the realms in search of answers. This is why he wonders now more than ever about the Lady who was also his mother and why she agreed to bring about the Elven union. This is why he pulls close the Jotun in his bed, drawing strength from the low thudding of the chest pressed to his and the whisper of cool breath at his cheek. And this is what he must bring himself to tell Loki now, to wake him and whisper that he doesn’t have all the answers, that he’s made mistakes, that he’s spent so much time being so frustrated at himself, his father, his mother, his sister, the world; that he’s filled with uncertainty but the one thing he’s sure of is _you, Loki, and us, and what I know we can do together._

**Author's Note:**

> Nuada's mother's name comes from the actual name of Balor's wife in Celtic mythology. Her story, of being the Svartalfr Princess, marrying Balor to unite the Elven realms and Malekith being her rebellious younger brother, was all thought up in conjunction with [dfotw](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dfotw/pseuds/dfotw), who then wrote it all up in fairytale format and I kept referring back to that in writing this, and couldn't have done it without her. 
> 
> This series is firmly ignoring whatever contradictory canon will be introduced in Thor 2, in regards to Malekith or anything else. The crossoververse is a much better place for Loki to exist anyway.
> 
> The part about the bifrost destruction disrupting the balance of power and instigating chaos across the realms comes from the Thor 2 prelude comic.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and giving my little series a shot. I so hope you're enjoying it and feedback is always welcome :)


End file.
